I think honest ID proponents are missing the whole point of teaching evolution in biology classes. Evolution isn’t a theory in a vacuum, it is the fundamental explanation for why biological processes work like they do. Before evolution, naturalists could examine plants and animals and write pretty accurate and detailed books about how they are constructed and how they work. Even today, a large part of biology classes is just passing on simple anatomy and biochemistry.

However, anyone who really studies biology has to wonder why, for example, we have two eyes, two legs, and two arms. Before evolution, we could only say something like Because His Noodley Appendage Made It So (so much for creation in his own image), or even come up with complex mythologies to explain natural phenomenon.

With the theory of evolution and modern genetics, we have developed a framework that can answer why things are the way they are—logically and with the ability to make predictions. For example, we can predict that genetic mutations would give rise to anatomical anomalies. Try explaining a two headed cow theologically, and you have to start invoking demons.

Without evolution as a framework for explaining why in biology, we’re stuck simply observing nature and not understanding it. So many aspects of biology are linked back to the evolution of the organisms and ecosystems involved that students cannot ever really understand what they are learning if they refuse to believe such a fundamental part of the science. That is why evolution must be taught early in Biology classes, and why confusing the issue with ID is not simply presenting an alternative to a single problem in isolation.

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Do try not to take me too seriously.

Try this:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/id/program.html

Watch it. Chapter 10 is where the evolutionary history of intelligent design is explained.

Can you be more specific? What Big Picture do you mean here?

Watch the program I linked about the Dover trial. The truth did prevail: ID has no scientific value, is purely religiously motivated and has produced nothing of merit. The cdesign proponentsists had a chance to present their case in a (potentially very supportive!) court, and most of them didn't even bother to show up, after initially saying they would. The few that did, ended up weakening the case for teaching ID in schools. Read the transcripts to see just how much harm Michael Behe does to his own case.

If ID actually had something to contribute to high school science classes, you'd think that the Discovery Institute folks would have appeared up in court to present their case. They didn't.

So I really don't see how you can object to that court ruling.

I'd love to see world religions taught in school. But as part of anthropology, sociology, political science and history. Not biology, since they have nothing to contribute to biology, except as a footnote in the history of science. And, as I've said before, and the Dover trial proved, ID is nothing more than biblical creationism in a cheap suit, so it doesn't belong in a biology class either.

Many Fundamentalists don't want other religions taught in schools because they know that their religion is the correct one, so they don't want children exposed to anything else. Personally, I'd love it if high schools could offer a comparative religions course like I had in college. Exposure to other faiths and ways of thinking is always a good thing. But some people are afraid of their children learning how the world works (science!), and also afraid of their children learning that some people believe different things.

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

That's pure crap, and you know it. Mathematics either works or it doesn't. If the equations don't balance, it doesn't work. You're proposing taking faith on… well, faith. That's not rational at all.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Mark Twain

Avatar courtesy of Bunny.

General relativity works within the range of the theory just like any good theory should. It does not explain the very big or the very small. Galaxy rotations are the very big. A hand-span of the centre of a planet or a few kilometres across the centre of the sun have not been measured as far as I know ... and GR is not applied on the atomic scale.

Sure GR works where it should and full marks to all those scientists finding new ways to prove GR works where it should ... very clever.

If scientists are wrong (and admittedly testing at the core of the earth is a long way off) then faith scientific can not fully guarantee that it will not be the very human cause of the start of tribulations. I believe it will be ... but that is faith, unfortunately.

I find I have very little time for fundamental IDer's who claim to speak the message and then put God back in the little box at the end of the tirade. Likewise I am finding less and less time for fundamentalist science unable to look beyond old balanced equations. Neither side gets to see what is presented.

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Great. I can't prove a time anomaly some 38 years ago but at least I tried to work it out. Travel through time as a medium is not possible and so that leaves folded time as an option. That much I worked out.

Folded time means this 'now' can be looked on with the same dispassionate logic that one would be expected to bring to an archaeological dig. I am not going to jump up and down saying you gotta believe me. When I found out science was not making any progress on co-existing time I worked out from scratch a dynamic structured time that looked slightly like Twistor but in six dimensions and central bounded.

I am not saying I am right. I am saying the idea has been ignored on this and a number of other forums and in the emails and letters I have sent out. I can console myself that in the event of loss at least it didn't involve intelligent land based lifeforms. It will be one hell of a show and all you have is my word on that.

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Co-existing time?
I'm sorry but- can you clarify what you are talking about here?

Take a parabola under the base line. It intersects at two points say x=-2 and x=2. At the base line there is a dual reading. Assume being able to raise or lower the base line to say x=-3 and x=3. For every base line there is a numerical pair.

Now assume points move along the line like a current so that the points 'feel' like they are advancing. At point x=3 it looks like x=-3 is a fixed historical point. At x=-3 it looks like x=3 is a set future. If the line is dynamic then any change calculates through. If that happens faster than the points on the line feel that it is happening there is an updating system on one parabolic type line.

There are two real physical point events and a parabolic line of calculated events. If you can fold space it still means distance between x=-3 and x=3 but maybe an accessable distance.

Like most people who believe they have experienced something strange I do not expect to be believed. It is my motivation and that is why I have tried to explain it. I tried at least.

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"Nature is obliged to let reality determine its laws, whereas mathematics is under no such constraint."

Something along the lines of Benjamin Frankling and the principles of electricity, or the Wright Bros and the principles of lift.

I suppose that is the big beef with ID, is that it cannot be disproved, that regardless the amount of evidence supporting Evolution, ID'ers will cling to ID for the unknowns? Is this a problem?

Any many ways Evolution is the same, as many cling to Evolution in belief the evidence is 'out there' yet to be discovered/learned.

What about beleived theories that remain untested due to lack of ability, such as theories involving the speed of light? Yet they remain theory.

Unfortuantetly, I do not agrre the Dover trial is the evolutionary history of intelligent design, but rather the teachers failure and/or ignorance to properly teach ID. They seem to painting with a wide brush. It would be the same as ID'ers focusing in on one Evolutionist mishap (bogus scientific data or assumption) and making a mockery of all evolutionary discoveries.


How it all started, an 'explosion', Big Bang, evolution, ID, whatever.

Exacty! Make blanket statement presenting 2 widely believed 'theories', ID and Evolution. ID simply states intelligence required and due to the nature of the subject it is not scientiic and will no longer be discussed as being so, the reminder of the class will focus on learning/understanding evolution to the best of our ability.... HOWEVER, I too would like to see World Religions introduced into high school to further address ID and other religous issues such as religious warfare, I think it would give students a much better understanding of the world, such as middles east conflict.

Talk about philisophical....... Don't you know you can prove anything with enough equations, substitutions and manipulation.

Then what is BBT, and when did 'explosion' occur? Why 10-43?

Did you watch the NOVA program, or not? By "evolutionary history of Intelligent Design," I was referring to the way "creationists" were simply "search and replaced" in the ID "textbook." If the book, Of Panda's and People which is the main book on ID from the Discovery Institute, can't lay out a successful case for why it is science, then what can? As I said, the main proponents of ID didn't even bother to show up for the trial.

Have you watched the NOVA program on ID? You have a lot of misconceptions about ID, evolution and science in general, and if you pay attention to that NOVA program, I think you'd learn a few things.

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"What do you care what other people think?" -- Richard Feynman
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled." -- Feynman, at the conclusion of his Challenger report

Could you please expand on this. What, exactly, do you believe Franklin proved about electricity? What, exactly, do you believe the Wright Bros proved about lift?


O.K., what part of the Modern Evolutionary Theory (MET) do you believe has insufficent eveidence?

Please provide examples of which theories you refer to, and what exactly about them remains untested.

But it wasn't the teachers who made such a mockery of ID. It was the ID experts like Micheal Behe who said things like (quoteing wikipedia, please note sources)

"...he conceded that "there are no peer reviewed articles by anyone advocating for intelligent design supported by pertinent experiments or calculations which provide detailed rigorous accounts of how intelligent design of any biological system occurred",
((Source: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District Trial transcript: Day 12 (October 19), AM Session, Part 1))

"and that the definition of 'theory' as he applied it to intelligent design was so loose that astrology would qualify as a theory by definition as well." ((Source: The New Scientist))


Do we also need to mention Scientology is not scientific, the Last Thursday-ism is not scientific, ad infinium ad nausium? If we have to mention all of the things that arn't scentific, when will we have time to teach the things that are scientific? And if we only mention ID, why does it get a privillaged mention?


I've done my best to explain (I'm rather limited in my own ability). I will let someone else answer.

When: About 13.8 billion years ago ((Source: NASA.com by way of wikipedia))

Why 10^-43 seconds? Because before 10^-43 seconds, physics didn't work the way we understand them to now. Since we don't yet understand exactly how physics worked, we cannot make any predictions on what happened before that point. And yes, that means literally anything could have caused the Big Bang (including the Divine), but since there is no way to test any supposition it is not science.

Please be sure to expand on my eairlier questions about which theories you feel have been sufficently "proven" (such as electricity and lift), which parts of MET have insufficent evidence, and what untested questions about physics at a high fraction of the Speed of Light (C) are believed dispite any evidence.

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Carl Matherly

Offical Battlestar Galactica Apologist

Named Time Magazine's 2006 "Person of the Year"

No, the problem is that the IDers want to make everything unknown and thus part of their agenda. Transitional forms for virtually every chordate class and order? Ignore them -- pretend they don't exist so that they can claim no "macroevolution" (their term). Just one of many examples. See talkorigins.org for the gory details.

Could you give us an example or two about what unknowns there are? And please don't make the stupid error Ben Stein makes in his commercials for Expelled of suggesting that evolution is supposed to explain the origin of life.

Yes or no: are you saying that the evidence for evolution is still to be discovered? No one "believes" evolution; those of us who know about the massive evidence for it accept it as the most likely explanation for the biosphere we observe. No faith required.

1. Do you understand yet -- youi've been told repeatedly -- what "theory" means in a scientific context? You appear to be using it here in the "only a theory" mode that people without a clue about science use so often.

2. What does the speed of light have to do with ID? By the way, the constancy of the speed of light is an observation, not a theory. That observation led, inter alia, to special relativity. Liike all observations, it is subject to change if and only if a contrary observation is made. Care to suggest where to find such an observation?

The Dover trial is obviously only part of the history of ID. I'm sure there will have to be more litigation before ID is properly put to rest. News at 11.

So how are teachers to teach ID "properly"? Are they supposed to teach god of the gaps, with the curriculum changing every time a gap is closed? Are they supposed to do that as part of a science program? Or are they just going to make that part of a sociology course on say, world religiions, where we can also hear about Indian, Australian, and Native American views on the origins of life the universe and everything?

Talk about broad brush.

Once again. Maybe some of this will stick this time:

1. Scientific theories are not "believed". They are accepted as highly probable explanations of how things work. They don't require faith, and are subject to replacement by better explanations if such are offered. As opposed to religiious beliefs, which are held fast even when shown to be highly improbable. Why so? Because some god is supposed to have revealed it to us.

2. ID is not a "theory". It is an unsupported and unfalsifiable hypothesis. It isn't even wrong.


1. It says "intelligence required" without any good reason. Do you have any good ones to present?

2. Why bother to introduce it, if only to say it's useless as science? Should we also debunk the FSM (sorry, pirates) -- and for that matter every other religious tradition in the world? Why just the Christian version?

Apart from the "further address ID" part, which I'd consider a pointless waste of class time, I agree entirely with this. We don't need any more (US) national leaders who think "they're all arabs".

No I didn't know that. Please elaborate. How about proving 1=0 for a start? Try not to divide by zero in the process.

C'mon. Apart from being off-topic in a thread about ID, you can read whole books on the subject of BBT. If you do so, and the book is halfway decent, perhaps you'll be disabused of the notion that it was an "explosion".

Short answer to "when": the current expansion of the universe has been extrapolated back to a time when the visible universe would have been very small (how small? that's another question entirely). Based on measurements (i.e., observations, the meat of science), this is currently projected to have happened 13.7 billion (that's American billion = 10⁹) years ago. Plus or minus a few hundred million. As time goes on, and further measurements are made, this is subject to refinement. Science doesn't know it all. We leave that to religion.

Why 10^-43 seconds? (Note that the 43 is a negative exponent, not a value subtracted from 10.) Look up Planck time. This is also off topic in this thread.

Lonest@r wrote:

“Legalism at it's finest, that is my argument. Basically stating, science is defined as being......, therfore religion is not science, ID is religion, therefore ID holds no validity in science, and therefore will be ignored....”

It was you and yorn who dragged this into the realm of judicature in the first place. I.D. may still be discussed in classes where it belongs, like philosophy or comparative mythology. Not ignored there, just in actual science classes where it has no place. If your car breaks down, you don’t call a baker, h’yah?

“Therefore silencing the opposing view...... kinda hard to make a one-sided argument....”

Literally, there is no opposing view and there is no argument. Supernatural ideas may not be invoked (even obliquely) in science classes.

“Make blanket statement presenting 2 widely believed 'theories', ID and Evolution.”

I.D. fails as an event theory because there is nothing to verify or falsify. I.D. fails as a construct or abstract theory because it has no predictive or explanatory value. Oh yeah, nobody believes evolution just as nobody believes gravity or electricity.

Regarding Ben Stein’s film, the dude should stick to something he actually understands, like game shows.

As has been pointed out, the speed of light (in a vacuum) is an observation, not a theory. But I understand your point. I just don't agree.

I don't believe in the theory of Special Relativity or Evolution by Natural Selection; at least not in any way you are using the term "believe".

My understanding is that, for example, Evolution is currently the best explanation of the development of life on Earth, that all the available experimental evidence supports it, and no evidence has been found to show it not to be the best explanation. There is no "belief" involved.

And yes, there is experimental evidence for Evolution, and not just the extensive fossil record. I would highly recommend, for example, the book, The Beak of the Finch.

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At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

Yep, and political speech writing. Where he doesn't have to be constrained by reality.